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Many print readers heard about Jenner cover on social media

The July issue of Vanity Fair, featuring Caitlyn Jenner on the cover, was the magazine’s highest-selling cover in nearly five years. (Annie Leibovitz/Vanity Fair via AP, File)
Photo:
Annie Leibovitz/Associated Press

Legacy media publishers are making a big push to reach their readers online, where they’re increasingly consuming content. But can digital help drive readers back to print products?

A new report from research company GfK MRI found that the print edition of Vanity Fair’s July issue featuring Caitlyn Jenner on the cover benefited from all the social media buzz around the magazine cover. According to GfK MRI’s survey of 1,798 adults who said they read the July issue of Vanity Fair, 40% of adults who read the print edition had not read the magazine in the prior 12 months and nearly half of these readers were between 18 and 34 years old.

GfK MRI’s study found that 43% of respondents said they first heard about the Caitlyn Jenner cover on social media. According to the survey, 37% of respondents who said the July Vanity Fair issue was the first they had read in the past year said they were “very likely” or “extremely likely” to read future issues of the magazine.

“You can’t extrapolate too much from one example but it does show the power of getting the word out and generating buzz and interest and having that flow into the consumption of other platforms,” said Mickey Galin, GfK MRI’s executive vice president of research.

Caitlyn Jenner, the Olympic champion formerly known as Bruce, revealed her new identity on the cover of Vanity Fair’s July issue to much fanfare. The Conde Nast-owned publication tweeted about its July cover on June 1, two weeks before the magazine was due to hit newsstands and subscribers.

The cover story was made available to digital subscribers on June 1. Readers could pay for a subscription that day, which would allow them to download the article immediately online and receive the full issue once it came out.

The Caitlyn Jenner story had a record 9 million unique visitors in the first 24 hours and ultimately generated 24 million unique visitors for the month, a Vanity Fair spokeswoman said. The magazine had more than 44 million total visits to its website in June and July, with roughly 11.6 million of those visits related to Caitlyn Jenner content, including the cover story. It was written by Buzz Bissinger, with photos by
Annie Leibovitz,
and the package included a behind-the-scenes video of Ms. Jenner during her photo shoot. The story had 3.9 billion social media impressions and the video has generated more than 20.9 million views.

The issue also did well on newsstands. Vanity Fair’s July issue had 432,000 single copy sales, making it the highest-selling cover in nearly five years, Vanity Fair said. The magazine had 186,619 average single copy sales for the first half of the year and average total circulation of nearly 1.2 million.

“What we saw with this cover is that the Internet is now another newsstand for us,” said Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair. “The social, video and digital content was compelling in a way that piqued people’s interest in owning a physical copy of the magazine. It created a digital moment, as it were, that made people want to hold the story in their hands.”

Corrections & Amplifications: Vanity Fair’s Caitlyn Jenner cover story was made available to digital subscribers on June 1, the same day the magazine put out the cover and a press release online. Readers could pay for a subscription that day, which would allow them to download the article immediately and receive the full issue once it came out. An earlier version of this story suggested the story was available online for all readers on June 1.

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